Interactive assembly by a two-arm robot agent

Abstract The development of a robotic system interacting with a human instructor requires not only highly skilled sensorimotor coordination and action planning but also the capability of understanding and communicating with a human being in a natural way. A typical application of such a system is interactive assembly. A human communicator sharing a view of the assembly scenario with the robot instructs the latter by speaking to it in the same way that he would communicate with a human partner. His instructions can be under-specified, incomplete and/or context-dependent. After introducing the general purpose of our project, we present the hardware and software components of a robot agent necessary for interactive assembly tasks. The architecture of the robot agent with two stationary robot arms is discussed. We then describe the functionalities of the cognition, scheduling and execution levels. The development tool used for modularly realising these functionalities is presented. The implementation of a learning methodology for a general sensor/actor system is briefly introduced.